Monthly Archives: January 2017

Spring is nearly here, the nights are getting lighter and daffodils starting to emerge & its time for spring cleaning.

I guess it would also be a good time of any customers with membership schemes to have a spring clean as well, a few tips would be to:

Have a look at existing membership cards to see if they need an update you could run a member competition for them to design the new cards and offer a prize, this is a great way to make members feel included and help if you are struggling with design ideas alternatively you could take a look at our card examples on our website for inspiration.

You could consider implementing a tracking system to monitor member activity which could provide vital information to a club in terms of retention and member movement (barcodes or magnetic strips could help you with this) depending on when your membership year runs it may be time to ask member if they are renewing, bear in mind that people are still struggling financially so you may want to consider incentives such as renew for 12 months and get one month free or a free gift.

If any readers of this have any further ideas for fellow organisations please feel free to add them to this blog.

We are now offering metallic plastic cards, you can choose from metallic gold and silver base cards (for the full colour plastic cards) on a solid PVC stock.

This product offers a really professional image, either for membership schemes or business cards.

There is one limitation with this product, we can not offer any white text/images (as there is not white base to show through the CMYK printing). Don’t let this put you off through as anything you have within your design with is white will simply show as the metallic base colour, This effect can look very good.

At the moment we can only offer this product in the 760 micron thickness, We are trying to source thinner stock but at the moment we are struggling. For most people this isn’t a problem with this product as they usually want the thickest possible product to give a professional look.

We have updated the website to promote our free design service for frosted, satin black and metallic plastic cards.

The design service can be requested via a form which asks various questions.

We ask the customer to provide as much information as possible to help with the design process, this way we can ensure that the design is customised as much as possible to the customers own vision. We provide examples of past work which can help provide ideas to the customer and we can base there design around on of these if required. The more information we had to go off the easier it is to create a stunning design based on the customers own needs and requirements.

Logos etc can be uploaded to the design request form, ideally these are provided as line artwork and in a high enough resolution so that the quality will not suffer when the cards are printed.

Please give the design request for a go if you are looking for a personalised design.

Alternatively you can email your own artwork to us, we will provide an email proof for your approval.

We have a customer at the moment who submitted terrible artwork for the full colour cards, he received his postal proof and was not happy with a number of things. My colleague very kindly agreed to wrestle with this artwork, free of charge and sent a photo-realistic proof over by email for him to approve prior to production of his 2nd postal proof.

He approved this email proof so we started production on the 2nd postal proof however the very next day the customer contacts us saying there is a typing mistake which our spell check department had not picked it up. My colleague was a little upset by this as it had taken him a long time to sort this customers artwork out and obviously he did not even bother to check the email proof properly. We do not have a spell check department, as a lot of our customers provide there own artwork (as this customer did!).

We are currently in the process of stopping production of the 2nd postal proof and yet again for no cost changing the customers own artwork.

I am not sure what the moral of this story should be, it could be for us not to fix customers artwork, make customers wait for 24 hours to approve an email proof, don’t bother at all the email proofs as they are not checked properly! Or should we just put this down as experience and try to to taint every customer with the same brush. Personally I think the latter is the best option however it is difficult!

Please please please, if you are placing an order with us, could you double and triple check all email proofs before approving them. Thank you!

Wanted to post a quick blog to remind you all that our special offer for 100 or 200 full colour solid plastic cards are still available.

The offer is very cost effective especially as it is applicable to our thickness solid plastic card which is 760 microns in thickness.

You can order the thinner 420 micron if you want however there is no price difference, a lot of customer have ordered the 760 micron as they give a more professional image to the end user (even after initially enquiring about the 420 micron or the 680 micron come to think).

I can confirm that we will honour this offer until at least the end of May however no guarantees after this date.

A taxi company placed an order with us today for priority cards, when I spoke to the customer on the phone she mentioned that the cards are being used to try and get some more business in as the recession seems to now be affecting them.

We deal with various different membership, loyalty, discount cards etc day in day out so have a lot of experience in this area. I agreed with the lady I spoke to, we have found a lot of people not only ordering these cards not re-ordering them at a later date which shows that there is a benefit to them.

It is such a good idea to to use our full colour solid plastic cards to try and promote a business, offering a small discount or VIP perks really does member a member or in the above case customer feel valued.

We have had a few orders for full colour solid plastic cards with personlisation recently.

In case you are not aware of what this means it is when the customers provides an excel file of variable data to be printed on the cards. Typically this will be a name and membership number but it can be pretty much anything the customer required. The only limit to the personlisation is the amount of text but if it physically fits on the cards we can print it on.

It is surprising how many customers don’t realise that we actually need the excel file when the order is placed. We load the excel file on to the printing plate when the order is placed so that the postal proofs are provided with the personalisation in place.

Unfortunately we have an order which is ready to proceed but the excel file is not ready and may not be ready for some weeks, which is a shame that the customer has concentrated so much on the artwork but does not have the variable data ready. We will obviously ensure the postal proof is dispatched asap for the customer on receipt of the excel file.

Recently we have been having a lot of well, erm, all I can say is time wasters.

Every day we receive lots of requests for photo-realistic proofs or for our free design service on, for example our clear plastic cards, from mainly genuine potential customers.

However, we do get time wasters who enquire about our free design service and our design team then produce a design and email it to them for approval. They then get us to make a number of alterations, which we do promptly and for no charge, then without warning, the person what was previously contacting us, maybe several times a day simple stops contacting us.

We have found it doesn’t matter how many times we email them to politely ask what the situation is, they simply ignore us.

Out of courtesy we would appreciate some sort of reply, even if it is “Please stop contacting me, I no longer want to order the cards”

That is FINE!

At least we know where we stand and can then delete your order/artwork from our system and spend our valuable time focussing on our genuine customers!

It’s one thing for us to produce good business cards and plastic cards but if the artwork supplied by the customer isn’t to the correct specification, then problems will arise.

We have in the last couple of months adopted a new approach to customer supplied artwork (predominantly for the full colour solid plastic cards).

On receipt all artwork is received to ensure it is technically ok to print.

If a customer supplies artwork which is nearly to the correct specification but needs small alterations we will make the alterations for the customer free of charge.

We will of course inform the customer that the artwork is not to the correct specification and ask that if any future artwork is submitted it is sent to us in the correct format.

We may occasionally ask for a deposit if extensive work is involved.

A lot of companies will accept any artwork files, even if they are technically not set up correctly and just print straight from them them resulting in the end result being less than desirable. We like to ensure that our customers are hippy with there cards and hence why we provide detailed artwork specifications and when necessary will reject artwork if the design team feels the quality of the end product will suffer. We do not reject artwork for the fun of it, we do it for the customers own benefit (some customer do not seem to realise this!).